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Summary

Attempts to comprehend the traumatic significance of Hiroshima in order to construct a new theory of history.

Through a critique of historyas a reality, a discipline, and a way of writingDeracination challenges the basic theoretical tenets of both humanism and postmodernism. As a discipline, history is currently undergoing what Heidegger would call a productive crisis," and a number of thinkers, including Michel Foucault, Hayden White, Paul Ricoeur, and Stephen Greenblatt, have begun to reexamine the cognitive assumptions and narrative paradigms that inform the discipline. This book radicalizes such developments in order to construct both a new theory of history as well as a new concept of how histories should be written. To make the interrogation concrete, the book focuses on Hiroshima and the ways in which the trauma of that event has been repressed by the discourses that historians have fashioned in order to explain what happened on August 6, 1945.

The issues raised in this book strike at the heart of the crisis of contemporary political rationality and its philosophical, literary, and sociological understanding. In addition, it is an important critique of the dominance of scientific epistemology as the model for philosophical and political rationality. It re-establishes the basis for a real contact on the part of critical reflection with self, world, and others.  Garth Gillan, author of Rising from the Ruins: Reason, Being, and the Good After Auschwitz

Davis draws on an impressive number of scholarly traditions from across a number of disciplines. This is a supple and sophisticated mind at work. This book is exciting, even exhilarating at times in its intellectual energy and expansiveness.  Gary A. Olson, coeditor of Race, Rhetoric, and the Postcolonial

Walter A. Davis is Professor of English at Ohio State University. He is the author of several books, including Get the Guests: Psychoanalysis, Modern American Drama, and the Audience and Inwardness and Existence: Subjectivity in/and Hegel, Heidegger, Marx, and Freud. He recently published the companion piece to the present volume: The Holocaust Memorial: A Play about Hiroshima.

Table of Contents

(Abridged)

Acknowledgments
Preface

1. THE WAY TO HIROSHIMA

I. Only Connect: Trauma in/and History
II. The Concept of Crisis and a Hermeneutics of Engagement
III. Only Connect: Why Hiroshima?
IV. On Psychoanalytic Method: No "Return to Freud"
V. Engaging the Audience: Agonistic IntersubjectivityVI. Only Connect: Immanence--The Existentializing Process

2. CUTTING BACK INTO LIFE

I. History as Hermeneutic of Engagement
II. Internalization and Bad Faith: The Disorder Called the Ego
III. Authentic Internalization: The Birth of Psyche
IV. Internalization and History
V. Language, Discourse (-Communities), the Problem of Style
VI. Horror, as Exemplar
VII. A Modest Proposal

3. THE SUBLIME AND THE KANTIAN RATIO, OR, HOW THE WHITE
MAN THINKS

THE CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY AT ISSUE

I. Affect and Attunement
II. Deracination as Concrete Deconstruction

READING AS INTERROGATIN-KANT'S CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT, SECTIONS
23-29

I. Beyond the Beautiful: From Pleasure to Desire
II. Frameworks: Opposed
III. Purposiveness: And the Contrapurpose
IV. Affect and Attunement in Depth: Inwardness versus the Ratio
V. From Ambivalence toward the Object to Intimations of the Bomb
VI. The Psyche in/and History
VII. The Scientific Imagination: Kant as Romantic Poet
VIII. Reason and the Bomb
IX. The Imagination's Re-education: Reason as Sublime Self-Reference
X. The Dynamic Sublime and the Inner World
XI. Sublimity and Theology: The Superego ... and the BombXII. Coda: Crypt

4. THE PSYCHE THAT DROPPED THE BOMB

OVERTURE: THE EGO AND ITS PLEASURE

THE EGO'S CRYPT: THE INNER STRUCTURE OF AN ANTI-DIALECTIC

I. The Psyche's Founding Condition
II. The Manic Defense against Depression
III. The Fractured Mirror and the Psychotic Core
IV. Soul-Murder Perfected: Death-Work as Self-Reference
V. The Law of the Son
VI. Intersubjectivity: "Concrete Relations with Others"
as Mutual Deadening
VII. The Trauma Is the Real: The Postmodern Condition Attained
VIII. Epiphany: The Eroticization of Thanatos

THANATOS AS SPIRIT IN AND FOR ITSELF

I. Rethinking Freud: Concrete versus Abstract Dialectics
II. Humanizing Thanatos: A Phenomenological Description
III. Death-Work versus the Death-Drive
IV. Experience and Existence
V. A New Theory of the Unconcious
VI. The Dialectic at the Core: The System UCS RedefinedVII. The Last Word: Thanatos in Reply

5. FROM ENTHUSIASM TO MELANCHOLIA AS SIGN OF HISTORY: OR,
REFLECTION FROM KANT TO HAMLET

I. Aesthetic Reeducation
II. The Tragic Register
III. The Aufhebung of Anxiety
IV. The Aufhebung of Thinking
V. Melancholia and the Tragic Historian

HAMLET, THE CONTEMPORARY OF THE FUTURE

I. First Soliloquy: Toward Subject as Who/WhyII. Second Soliloquy: The Life of Questioning--Reflection as Interrogation and Self-Mediation
III. Third Soliloquy: Thinking as the Cutting Edge of Passion
IV. Fourth Soliloquy: Thinking as the Movement from Mind to Psyche
V. Fifth Solilquy: Melancholia versus Catharsis

I. Affect as AgonII. The Inner World of the Image: Reconstructing the Regressive-Progressive Method

"WHAT HURTS" THE DIALECTICAL IMAGE IN HISTORY

I. Art: Between Psychosis and Neurosis/Normalcy

DIALECTIC OF THE CONCRETE--THE THANATOPTIC IMAGE AND THE CRYPT IMAGE

I. At the Origin: Death-Work and the Existential Unconscious
II. The Origins as Historicity
III. The Heart of the Image: The Psychotic Register Laid Bare
IV. Affect: Its Primacy and Its Dialectic
V. The Nuclear Unconscious: The Temporality of the Dialectical
Image
VI. The Motive for Art